Lenanon, Oregon

[kiaya611]

I live in Lebanon, Oregon. I bought a house with 1/2 of an acre of land. I have wanted to raise chickens for YEARS, but never lived in a place I could do it. I actually live in an un-anennexed (sp) portion of Linn County which allows me "Limited Farm Use" ... so I can raise most any feathered creatures or small furry creatures. Since I am on a small parcel, I can't have any larger animals, although I can have Ostriches which seems counter-intuitive since they are so large. I can have ONE large animal (horse, cow, pig, goat, etc.) IF it is for show. If I had 1 acre or more I could have most of these animals. But, I am very excited about my chickens.

I was only going to get 1 dozen...BUT when I started to tell my friends that i was going to raise my own eggs, they all said that they would buy eggs from me, so I ended up with 42 chicks. I have a tendency of jumping in with both feet.

I am disabled/retired, so I have all the time I need, alittle lacking in the money dept., but I figure, if I can sell the eggs to cover most of the feed/litter/etc. ... expendable items, then I can due this just fine. The time is my own donation and I am not running a business so I don't need a profit margin. It is more of a hobby. I am looking forward to this. It is part of a long coming dream to being more self sufficient. I am planting a garden and learning to can this year too. I should be pretty busy. That is much better than holding down the couch.

Take care,

 

[chickenboy]

Do you have a coop or a run so all those chickens can live in it, what type of chickens are you getting.

 

[kiaya611]

I am converting (mostly building over) an 8X32 shed for my chickens. I have re-roofed it and am working on putting new walls on it. The back and one side is done. I have the front 1/2 done (it should be done today as well as the 4th wall. I will be building 5X10 roost area over a pit that I can clean from the outside (saw it on http://world.std.com/~kcl/chickencoop.html if you go to the bottom you will see it). I will also be putting up a fence for a chicken yard that will be about 20X30 or so. I also plan to have a secondary chicken yard to move them to when the first yard is in need of replanting/rejuvenation.

I am just starting this and am learning along the way. It has been fun so far, I will be glad when the coop and yard are finished. I still have a bit of time before I want to put them outside. It is still getting cold at night and they are not fully feathered yet. I most of them are 3.5 weeks old and the others are 2.5 weeks old (some died in the 1st shipment because they the postal people didn't put them on the plane when they should have and they waited an entire day at the airport on the shipping end). The hatchery took care of everything, but the postal people definitely had a problem on their hands.

I am still trying to decide how to build the nest boxes and how many to build. I have heard of several different ratios of birds to nests from 1:3 to 1:8. I don't want to have to build 42 boxes, but I don't want too few either. I need to figure this out VERY soon though.

 

[chickenboy]

The way I know that it's 4 hens per every nest so if you have 42 hens you'll need about 10 or 11 nests which won't be hard to make.

 

[kiaya611]

That's good to know. I really would hate to have to make 42 boxes. I can easily handle 11.
Well I just finished the outer walls of the coop today. If the weather is nice tomorrow, I will work on the roost pit...then on to the nests. I think I will get my nephew over here and get him to dig the holes for the fence posts for the chicken yard. I am not as young as I used to be and that kind of jarring work really plays havoc with my Fibromyalgia. Anyway, I am definitely making progress. The worst part was trying to work with something that was already there and poorly built...nothing was true...no right angles...one side was lower than the other, but I got it done. I want to plumb a water line in and put in electricity. The electricity will be easy, but getting the plumbing out there will be a challenge.

All in all, things are going well. I just hope the weather holds so that I can finish this before I have the hens laying in the house